At the same time, it’s not quite as simple as that…
Why are you trying to educate me on this? You know I am vastly more familiar with this topic than you, yes? Or were you merely thinking aloud for your own sake?
I am well aware of oppositional arguments at length as well as the development of these arguments. If I tried to speak on this topic with the full depth and breadth it deserves, it would be so long and convoluted as to be unreadable unless I wrote a whole ass book. While I am sure there are those who genuinely feel their rights are being lessened by others gaining legal protections, this doesn’t alter the fact that pitting one set of human rights up against another is a common tactic for derailing human rights movements along with ‘protect the women and children’.
And of course it gains traction because no one wants to see themselves as bigoted, so if they can say “I am not against group A; I’m just protecting group B” that feels a whole lot better. For example, the issue with trans women and inmate housing. It’s raised as a concern over sexual violence. But here’s the thing: sexual violence in women’s prisons is staggeringly common, enough so that trans inmates almost certainly don’t make a statistical blip. Now it may be true that there are inmates who genuinely have a greater fear of trans women than cisgender women or male prison staff, and it may also be true that trans policies for prisons may require careful consideration. But what’s fishy is that the concern for women’s safety in prisons as a social issue seems to begin and end with trans inmates. Is that genuine concern, or is that women’s safety being used as a wedge issue? Which is not to suggest that no one has genuine concern for female inmates, but by and large, the use of them as a wedge issue derails a more complex and nuanced conversation that was already going on.
Likewise with issues like sports policies and trans care for youth. It’s not that there are no difficult, complex and nuanced conversations to be had here. It’s that those conversations are drowned out by noise when they are used as props in an anti-trans rights push. Suddenly people who never gave a shit about women’s sports are demanding they be fair, but only so far as the exclusion of trans women is concerned, ’cause if we’re talking any other facet of fairness in women’s sports then the only people who give a shit are female athletes and a subset of feminists, I suppose. But at the end of the day we still don’t land on anything resembling fairness in sports because sports aren’t fair, typically not to women, people with intersex conditions, people with disabilities, were income/ wealth inequality is concerned, and trans people can just be tacked on to what is probably a much longer list than I managed.
Simon Paynton 1 month, 2 weeks ago.
Unseen.
